For Malaysia Airlines, 2014 was a devastating year. I remember flight MH17, which was shot down on July 17 while flying over eastern Ukraine. But months before, another flight — MH370 — disappeared from the radar never to be seen again (well, not intact). A friend directed me to this video, and the story is as engrossing as anything you’ll see on the big screen, only done with flight simulator software and stock footage. Make sure you can spare the full hour before you start watching!

Side note: it’s a good documentary, but Good lord how I hate YouTube’s aesthetics of catchy titles and eye-grabbing thumbnail videos. At least they’ve fixed the comments.

If you’ve haven’t heard of Big Biology until today, well, welcome to the club. It’s a podcast, and it describes itself thusly:

Scientists talking to scientists, but accessible to anyone. We are living in a golden age of biology research. Big Biology is a podcast that tells the stories of scientists tackling some of the biggest unanswered questions in biology.

Right up my alley! I started with the latest episode, on invasive species, and the intro seems a bit too scripted, but the focus is on the interviews, and those delivered. It’s already on my Overcast list of regulars. (ᔥRobin Sloan)

While writing about Facebook, Ernie Smith of Tedium repeats what many — most? — people who use it despite knowing better tell themselves:

To be clear, I knew Facebook was a really undesirable thing to have in my life (it’s pissed me off plenty in the past), but it’s a necessary evil, because it captures people in your life that you would lose contact with entirely if you did not have a presence there. But it’s really troublesome to me how much of that stuff is getting flooded out by literally dozens of pieces of unrelated junk.

I haven’t had a Facebook account for 10+ years, yet I have kept (intermittent, once-every-few-years) touch with elementary and high school friends and distant family members. Sure, I don’t know where everyone’s been for their summer vacation, whether my nieces and nephews twice-removed have new pets or which new schools they are going to, and I certainly don’t know whether someone I barely knew at high school has a new job (though there is always LinkedIn for that one). If “losing contact” means not knowing all of that, well, so be it. But keeping track of the ins and outs of people’s lives is not a prerequisite for asking them for help and advice if and when needed, nor helping out when asked.

So what, exactly, is the tradeoff here?

The original World of Goo was one of the first games in my ever-expanding Steam library. I can’t wait to play the sequel on the Apple Vision Pro! (ᔥWaxy.org)

After mentioning my planned media fast yesterday, I have to note two things:

• it is not in any way related to the WaPo walkout (though I support it!)
• it is also not related to Bryan Caplan’s call to stop reading the news (though I support that as well, obviously, and for the same reasons he states!)

I, too, endorse FT’s daily Big Read!

Middle age has been on people’s mind lately. As I’ll hit 40 in a couple of weeks I am well within the demographic, but haven’t given the matter much thought. Oliver Burkman’s newsletter from today nicely encapsulates my view on the matter, which doesn’t lend itself to crises of the midlife sort once you have it, though obtaining it may possible constitute a crisis.

He writes about “clenching”: trying to preserve meaningful moments in formaldehyde, or wasting your life away on optimizing it for those meaningful moments while they fly by you. In contrast, you can acknowledge the moments for what they are — ephemeral:

Sure, you can have a hundred tea ceremonies. You can ever have them all with the same people. But you can only have that ceremony, that cup of tea, once. Then the moment evaporates forever.

On the days I let myself move through life in this unclenched way, things tend to feel much more naturally enjoyable. Not because I’m trying to make myself appreciate them, or self-consciously “feel grateful” for them – but simply because I’ve (temporarily) suspended the other agenda that was getting in the way.

This way of looking at life does not come naturally to everyone. Certainly not to me; as a 12-year-old reading Around the World in 80 Days, I thought Phileas Fogg’s optimal ways of doing everything were the bees knees. Then I started workin in health care and I saw that:

1. We are optimizing ourselves to death.
2. People can get terribly sick, or injuured, or both, and be bed-bound, or debilitated, or die, at any moment and for any reason, and quite often for no reason at all.

And I started thinking about life the way Burkman described, more or less. Which I did around the time we had our firstborn, a bit over a decade ago — too early for that event to qualify as a midlife crisis, but maybe I was ahead of the curve. But if you are going to have a crisis of your own, I suggest it being of the sort that turns your life away from clenching.

Tim Harford on the UK’s crumbling health care system:

In the case of St Mary’s Hospital in London, these weak foundations are all too literal. The Financial Times recently reported that the hospital had rotting floor joists, frequent flooding, a hole in one lavatory floor that led to a car park, a ward closed due to a collapsed ceiling, and sewage backing up out of the drains and into the outpatient department. Yet St Mary’s is no longer regarded as an urgent priority for investment, because five other hospitals appear to be in more imminent danger of falling down.

15-some years ago, when I was contemplating what to do after graduating from medical school, the UK was on the list of places for potential residency. It quickly got crossed off because it was hostile to foreign doctors — especially compared to the US — but good for me that it was!

So, it’s done. I am at my low point of X usage. I’ve muted all but a handful of accounts (re-inventing lists in the process), and realized that I can do once-per-week wellness checks at most and not miss out on anything of importance. Now I only need to stop checking the Washington Post home page, and my media fast may begin.